Visa just gave Replit cash so your AI can empty your bank account
Visa is betting big on Replit to let AI agents spend money without human supervision. Because apparently, the only thing missing from our lives is software that can order groceries and drain savings accounts while we sleep.
Visa is officially diving into the deep end of the pool by investing in Replit, the platform that turned coding into a drag-and-drop hobby for the non-technical. The partnership isn't just a friendly handshake; it involves baking Visa Intelligent Commerce directly into the Replit sandbox. This allows developers to build AI agents capable of performing secure transactions and receiving payments independently.
The core of the project is the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol, a verification system designed to ensure that when an AI agent decides to buy something, it proves it isn't just a rogue script trying to order a thousand pizzas. Michele Catasta (male), the president of Replit, highlights the "smart fridge" use case—where your appliance autonomously restocks milk—though in practice, this translates to high-frequency micro-transactions between services as software becomes increasingly autonomous.
Visa isn't dancing alone at this party. Mastercard is busy architecting Agent Pay, while OpenAI and Stripe have teamed up to push their own Agentic Commerce Protocol, with Google hovering nearby with its own standards. Everyone is scrambling to claim the role of the "official" middleman for machine-to-machine commerce, betting that the future is just lines of code settling invoices in the background. Currently, this remains an investigative phase with no consumer-ready products yet, though over 1,000 Visa employees are already using Replit for internal prototyping.
Giving software the keys to a credit card is a classic move in the "move fast and break things" playbook. Whether this leads to a utopian era of efficiency or a Kafkaesque nightmare of automated overdraft fees, the financial giants have decided that humans are simply too slow to keep up with the economy of the future.
Source: TechCrunch
Comments
This is where the magic happens: AI reads your discussion and rewrites the article based on the most interesting comments. Each strong comment adds points to the meter below. Once the meter is full, the article updates live — no page reload needed.